I also want to remind the House that recently, in the aftermath of the referendum result, he wrote an article in which he said he had also been on the losing side in the referendums on the abolition of the Seanad and on Oireachtas inquiries. He said he was disappointed at the time, amid recriminations, but came to realise that the people were wise and made the right decision. He said that the Seanad provides a check and a balance on the Dáil that would otherwise not exist and that we have seen the value of that in recent months. That was a generous statement from him to make because he was, until very recently, a convinced abolitionist.
This House has a limited role in relation to legislation. We can, under Article 23 of the Constitution, amend Government legislation or propose our own legislation but Dáil Éireann has the power to effectively reject our views after 90 days. That 90-day period is not very long. I mention that because I believe Ireland is developing and maturing into a different kind of democracy. The sad moment when Members of this House were forced to vote, by a party whip, for their own abolition should be a memory of the past only. I appeal to Members of this House, not today but over the coming weeks, to consider whether the application of a party whip in every matter really adds to Irish democracy or whether it would be far better for Members of this House, bearing in mind the limited role they have, to take it on themselves to express their own individual outlook and to vote in accordance with their own individual preference.It would be remiss of me if I did not wish the Taoiseach all the best. We were all taken aback, or even shocked, when he made his announcement at 12 o'clock. To me personally, to the Fine Gael Party and to the people of Ireland, he has been an exemplary Taoiseach and I wish him all the best. It was a decision not taken lightly and, judging by his words, it was both a personal and political decision, which I respect. Certainly, these have been very turbulent times, with the Government successfully overseeing Ireland through Covid and also the recovery of the economy, and the Taoiseach was there as part of the Government throughout those times. It is not an easy decision and I wish him, his family and his staff well. I thank him for everything he has done for the country. I have received many text messages from people throughout the country saying they are totally shocked and asking me to wish him all the best. It is nice that people are remembering him.
The other issue I raise relates to small businesses. They are on their last legs. I acknowledge the Minister, Deputy Coveney, will meet representatives of small businesses in Limerick over the coming days but those in retail and hospitality, in particular, need something done for them. They need changes to be made and perhaps the VAT rate to be reconsidered. It was increased from 9% to 13.5% and that needs to be looked at. Small businesses cannot compete at the same level as big businesses and we need to differentiate between the two and find a policy that works. One size does not fit all. We need to find something that will help save small businesses. I understand the Minister is due to come before the House for a debate at some point, but I would like that to be expedited because I know from having spoken to small businesses that some of them are on their last legs.
]]>In this particular case, the primary legislation to transpose the directive was enacted by the Oireachtas and the Minister, Deputy Catherine Martin, who is the responsible Minister, pushed that through. The Commission has now found that failure to follow that up with guidelines and implementation procedures has amounted, in effect, to a failure by the Irish State to implement a European directive. The consequence of that is as follows. We have to pay €2.5 million to the EU and to pay a daily fine of €10,000. That is being forfeited by the Irish State because of the failure of that Department to implement the follow-up procedures which are required. In this context, the committee believed what it was being told about all of the difficulties which arose with regard to non-implementation but at no time were we alerted to this difficulty or impending fine which has now been imposed on Ireland.
Two consequences flow from that. One is that we should include in the terms of reference of the committee follow-on arrangements, which are necessary to ensure implementation of a directive. Second, we should do that by changing the Standing Orders of the committee to make it clear that we cannot have a situation where these types of situations are concealed from us.
I am proposing that tomorrow's meeting of the Committee on Parliamentary Privileges and Oversight, CPPO, should consider as a matter of urgency changing the Standing Orders of our committee and that this House, at the earliest available opportunity - I would even suggest Thursday - makes this Chamber available for a meeting of the committee so that the relevant officials who are responsible for this non-transposition are brought in, asked to deal with the matter and to explain what has happened.
I am asking for those things to be done. I know the CPPO agenda is not set by this House but by the committee itself. However, the urgency of this matter is demonstrated by the fact that by Thursday morning, €20,000 more will have been lost due to non-action by the Irish State. I am asking the Leader to ensure that when this House sets up a committee, we are not playing blind man's buff and being deceived by the Executive as to what is really happening behind the scenes with the failure of the Irish Government to implement directives, with the financial consequences for the Irish taxpayer.
]]>I was glad Senator Kyne said local opinion is with us on this. It was suggested at the time that some environmentalists locally were wholly opposed to this. Possibly there were a few but we spoke to local people from the community when we visited Derrybrien and were satisfied the people of Derrybrien were with us and wanted that installation kept. Not the noisy couple of sandal-wearers who may or may not have written a few letters of protest, but the genuine people in the locality wanted this facility kept.
What happens now? As Senator Mullen suggested, why not go to Brussels and say it does not make sense to knock this down and wreck the environment a second time in order to undo what has happened? We could go on our knees and say we made a bags of this, should not have allowed the ESB to procrastinate for two decades on the matter and should have done something sooner. The Government should apologise for that but please, let common sense re-assert itself and let this valuable piece of national infrastructure be kept in place, rather than destroyed in an act of "Alice in Wonderland" nonsense on stilts. I am sorry the Minister of State is rejecting this legislation but when the damage is done on the top of that mountain again, this Government will be responsible for it and nobody else.
]]>The Minister of State stated acceptance of this Bill would set a bad precedent. If he had said the Attorney General was advising the Government at the Cabinet meeting today that for Ireland to adopt the measures provided for in the Bill would be unconstitutional because it would breach European law and that nothing of this kind could be done under European law, I would be impressed even though I would profoundly disagree. If he had said that, I would understand it.
I reiterate my example of the motorway bridge in France. Would anybody expect the French Government to smash up a bridge because it had done damage to a river in France? They would not, but in Ireland the power of the ESB was such that it clung onto its unauthorised development for so long and incurred fines for Ireland. A pathetic Government response kowtowed to the ESB, did nothing about this and allowed the ESB keep the benefit of its unlawful acts over the bones of two decades. That is what went wrong and that is why we got fines. It was the cowardice of Irish Governments that led to this mess.
I appreciate the care the Minister of State gave to his response. He said the Western Development Commission is not in a position to take this over because this is not its bailiwick. The Act provides for the powers to be given to that commission but the real solution is to give it the assets, tell it to operate them and it will go to a commercial wind farm operator and say, "On an agency basis, manage this place, generate the electricity and send us the cheque." That is the simple solution. I do not expect the people in Ballaghaderreen suddenly to become electricity generation experts. All I want is that this valuable €200 million investment is not destroyed. We all inspected the Slieve Aughty mountains and saw what it would take to restore this land. All I want is that that operation, which will create massive further environmental damage, not be undertaken. There are quarries, roads and massive plinths. There are things like enormous Second World War pillboxes on which these turbines are located.
]]>On a more serious note, there are a number of features on which I would ask for a reaction from our guests here today. One is head 8 of the heads of Bill before us and in particular subsection (4), paragraph (e). That subsection says that the external oversight body shall be comprised of a number of persons and then adds in, as the last of the people, the Secretary General of the Department of Defence. It struck me that it is stated in head 6 that this external oversight body is expected to be independent in the discharge of its functions. How do our guests view the point of whether it can be really independent if the Secretary General, who is the chief civil servant in the Minister’s Department, is also a member of the body? That seems to me to be a little inconsistent.
Second, the point has been made that the Director of Public Prosecutions in non-military matters and his or her staff are not excluded from membership of Civil Service representative bodies or unions, like the Association of Higher Civil and Public Servants. Do our guests see an issue with why the director of military prosecutions should be different? It occurred to me that day to day, from my experience of the Defence Forces, which I must say is very limited, commanding officers, who are members of RACO or whatever, carry out minor judicial functions relating to discipline, punishments and the like in relation to enlisted men and their own colleagues. If I am wrong on this, I could be enlightened, but I do not see how membership of RACO would be unsuitable in the case of a military judge but is suitable in the case of ordinary members of a court martial who act as a judge and are bound to act judicially and as commanding officers in their day-to-day disciplinary functions.
I wish to touch on something to which I think Colonel King referred. There was an adjudication in the issue of whether the director of miliary prosecutions could be a member of RACO. As I understand it, this matter was subject to adjudication or arbitration by both parties, RACO and the Department of Defence. Daniel Murphy, the adjudicator on 24 May 2023, issued a determination. I will quote two passages:
Denying a person freedom of association in the context of quasi-trade union membership is a very serious matter and, if it were to be denied, I consider that it would be reasonable to expect that the Oireachtas would legislate for it specifically having considered the pros and cons in open parliamentary debate, not that it should arise from secret exchanges between a Government Department and its legal advisors.
This was in the context, as I understand, that the Department simply said in its circular that whoever got the job could not be a member of RACO. Mr. Murphy went on to say:
In the circumstances, I conclude that the prohibition on membership of RACO for the Director of Military Prosecutions is not reasonable against the background of all the facts set out above. Therefore, I find Paragraph 25 of the Terms and Conditions of Service for the appointment of the Director of Military Prosecutions which provides that the Director should not be a member of an association established pursuant to Section 2, Defence Amendment Act, 1990 should be deleted from those Terms and Conditions so that the current and any future such Director should be free to be members of RACO.
In those circumstances, is it the case that we are actually being invited by the Department to overrule an adjudication to which it was party and that this is what Mr. Murphy, the adjudicator was saying, that the pros and cons would have to be discussed in a parliamentary committee? Maybe our guests would comment on the oddity of that where there is a system for dispute resolution and then you put into an Act a section overruling the decision by which you yourself were bound.
Those are the questions I would like to put to our guests.
]]>This is a special and unusual Bill. It arises in the circumstances that ESB, through a subsidiary company called Gort Windfarms Limited., took a lease of property in the mountains between counties Clare and Galway. It built a wind farm on the land it leased, with a considerable number of wind turbines and enough capacity to power 30,000 homes. As a result of the construction, it appears that a peat slide took place in a gully about the length of the distance from this Chamber to Kildare Street. I have seen this. The peat slide polluted an adjoining river heavily, causing serious damage to the fish stock. These circumstances gave rise to an entirely justifiable environmental outcry. After a number of legal steps were taken, it was determined that Ireland was in breach of its obligations at European level by having permitted this wind farm to be established and built without proper environmental impact regulations and reports and without proper measures to conserve and preserve the environment. ESB tried to fight these decisions and, eventually, the European Commission started to impose fines on Ireland for non-compliance with environmental impact law at a European level. The consequence of all of that was that the ESB, through its subsidiary, brought an application for substitute consent to allow it to keep the wind farm in existence, notwithstanding the fact that it had been built without appropriate compliance with environmental impact protection law at Irish and European levels.
The application for substitute consent was made to An Bord Pleanála. On 12 March 2021, an inspector's report was prepared which suggested that the wind farm should be retained and the board should provide substitute consent. At a later stage, the board rejected the recommendation of its inspector. It did so on a very narrow ground, which was, effectively, that it was impossible to undo the damage done originally. The inspector's report was very careful and detailed. It pointed out what would be obvious to anyone. I do not know if the Minister of State has had the opportunity but Members of the Independent Group hired a bus and went to inspect the site and saw all of the equipment in operation. It became obvious to us that the valley down which the peat slide had taken place had been completely rehabilitated with grass, shrubs and the like and that there was no imminent or obvious likelihood of any further environmental damage of this kind taking place. The result of An Bord Pleanála's refusal to give substitute consent is that Gort Windfarms Limited., the ESB body that carried out this development, is under an obligation, once an enforcement notice is served by Galway County Council, to undo the development. This will involve dismantling the massive concrete plinths, removing all the generators and roads it built from the mountainside, and, possibly even refilling the lake which was the quarry from which all the stone used in the development came. To carry out works of such enormous size and complexity, you can only say there is a real likelihood of further damage to the flora and fauna of the area and further damage to the environment.As a matter of European law, there is a cardinal principle that people who breach environmental law should not be allowed in general terms to benefit from their own breaches. This means the ESB should not, as a matter of principle, be entitled to benefit from the fact it built a wind farm in contravention of the various standards that were required of it at the time. The European Court of Justice is very clear in its jurisprudence that people who breach the law in these circumstances, unless they can get the equivalent of substitute consent at European level, must undo the damage they have done.
Let us consider an example. Let us suppose a motorway was built in France across a valley and a bridge was built in the bed of a river that did very serious damage to the fish stock, a rare species of snail or a breeding ground for this or that rare animal. It would be impossible, in fact, without removing the motorway bridge to bring back the river to its original condition. This does not mean as a consequence that European law requires the bridge be demolished. There has to be proportionality in all of this. There has to be reasonableness.
All of this was accommodated in the Bord Pleanála inspector's report. The reasoning of An Bord Pleanála itself is staggeringly deficient in that it does not address all of the findings of its inspector. To my mind, that is the most surprising aspect of it. In a very comprehensive analysis of what had happened, which was very serious, and what was possible to do by way of restoration of the environment, the inspector came to the conclusion that demolishing it was not a reasonable or practicable proportionate thing to require and that, therefore, the board should grant the ESB substitute consent to retain it.
Faced with the situation that the highest non-court appellate body in Ireland in planning matters had refused substitute consent, I fully concede the Government found itself in a corner. On the one hand, it appears it was being fined for failing to undo the damage as required by European law and, on the other, due to the decision by An Bord Pleanála to reject its own inspector's report, no substitute consent was available. It was in this context that our group visited the site at Derrybrien. We saw the turbines in operation and the skeleton staff keeping them in operation and proposed that they should be retained. We retained a very skilled parliamentary draftsman in Dr. Brian Hunt to draft legislation for us that would not reward the ESB in any way for its breaches of the law but, on the contrary, would divest it of its wind farm, which would be handed over to another State agency that would operate it in the national interest, and any revenues accumulating from its operation would be applied to environmental projects in the area.
The situation we now find ourselves in is that this country is busily installing gas and diesel emergency generating capacity because our natural gas and other forms of generation are inadequate to ensure we do not have brownouts or blackouts in certain circumstances. It is to avoid this that the legislation has been proposed, and to take into account that the national interest requires us to increase the volume of wind-generated energy rather than rely on fossil fuels of one kind or another, even on an emergency basis, to keep our economy going, our cities lit and industries operating. The legislation speaks for itself. It does not contravene European law. We have been assured of this by high legal authority; I am not operating on my own say-so. It is compatible with European law. It deprives the ESB of the ill-gotten gain of owning or operating a wind farm in the Slieve Aughty mountains, which it built improperly and which caused major and irreversible environmental damage to a river. We have carefully crafted legislation to bring about a common-sense and reasonable outcome that keeps in place the generating capacity for 30,000 homes but deprives the malefactors, namely the ESB and its subsidiary, of the benefit of the wrongful acts they committed.
It has been indicated to me that the Government will oppose this measure. I deeply regret this but I will wait to hear the Minister of State's detailed reasoning for so doing. It is sad that a Government with a Green Party energy Minister is in the position now of ordering the demolition of wind from capacity for 30,000 homes at a time the same Government is reluctantly, and I admit it is reluctantly, investing in further emergency fossil fuel capacity to keep the economy going. It is in this spirit that I propose the Bill. It is an unusual Bill. It is not often that I suggest the Oireachtas intervenes to provide, effectively, a solution to a problem of this kind but it is a necessary one. I look forward to the debate in the House.
]]>The second issue is the code of practice. I appreciate that the Minister is going to generate that but we should have some kind of regular review built into the statute so that the code of practice does not fossilise.
Third, with regard to the number of offences that are covered in the Schedule, I notice that apart from the security of the State, they are all personal injury-type offences. Maybe it is a bit topical, but arson is one thing which, at the moment, carries a life sentence. Organised crime is something at which we should also look. It seems to be that some of the offences covered could be minor compared with some of those.
There is one last point I wish to put out, which is that if people are going to be compelled to produce data from their own resources or from national databases and the like, the circumstances in which they are going to face such compulsion are very important. We hear so often now of people looking for dashcam footage. I have often wondered whether I am entitled to go around my neighbourhood using a dashcam as a local vigilante. In any event, however, it is very frequently sought. We should be conscious in all of this that nobody is going to be convicted on AI. In the end, a jury, judge or whoever is going to have to get the testimony of a garda and look at the material themselves to see whether they accept all this. I accept there is a danger that people will be arrested and unfairly made a suspect if the technology is not good. However, the chance of anybody being wrongfully convicted because of an algorithm is zilch.
]]>What I want to say about John Bruton can be reduced to one sentence: He was a genuine, authentic, honest and brave character. As Senator Joe O’Reilly just said, you knew exactly what he thought, and he was honest in all his opinions.
Senator Joe O’Reilly mentioned that he was in college with Finola. I was reflecting last night as I went along the corridor in my house. I have a poster on the wall for “Garret’s local team” in the 1979 local elections. Finola, Joe Doyle, Tommy Woods and I were Garret's local team. She was very active in Young Fine Gael. Garret FitzGerald encouraged people like myself - I was just five years out of college and she was still in college - to stand and get involved in politics to transform Irish politics. When you think about it, John Bruton himself was elected at the age of 22 in a by-election. He had been waiting for 12 years for his run at being a Minister for Finance and had been waiting for 22 years for the unanticipated crack at being Taoiseach.
In all that time, I cannot think of any occasion on which he said anything unkind, nasty or unpleasant in these Houses about anybody. I may have a rose-tinted view and I am sure he was a highly competitive politician. However, during all that time during which I dealt with him in various shapes and forms in Fine Gael, the Progressive Democrats, etc., I never remember him saying anything unkind or bitter about anybody else. He was an enigma in some respects because he came from what would have been seen as the conservative Christian democrat wing of Fine Gael, rather than Garret FitzGerald’s social democratic wing of Fine Gael. Yet, as Senator Joe O’Reilly said, he was able as Taoiseach to command a coalition with Proinsias De Rossa’s party as his partner in government.I remember that well because we in the Progressive Democrats thought it was our opportunity. We got ten seats in the previous election and we were entertained to a meeting with the Labour Party. Former Deputies Mervyn Taylor and Ruairí Quinn were representing then Labour leader Dick Spring, who was not going to meet us on that occasion, which was a signal in itself. I remember Ruairí Quinn smoking a large Havana cigar and dismissing us as people who were not going to be allowed into government. That Government seemed an unlikely political combination but it succeeded due to John Bruton's diplomacy. At the end of that period in government when he faced into an election, John, the conservative Christian democrat leader of Fine Gael, urged voters to give their preferences to the Democratic Left rather than the Progressive Democrats. That rankled with me at the time, I must confess, but there you are.
On Northern Ireland, he was absolutely honest in his convictions. He came from a Redmondite family. He was not in the Collins-IRB tradition of Fine Gael at all. He clung to the notion that even the 1916 Rising was unfortunate and unnecessary, a proposition with which I would not agree, but he articulated that view and had the courage to do so. Even if you profoundly disagree with him, very few people would have had the bravery to say that even if it was what they meant and that was why John Redmond's picture was in his Taoiseach's office. As Senator Joe O'Reilly said, it enabled him to extend a hand to unionists in Northern Ireland, which is still essential but was most essential then because politics in Northern Ireland before 1998 was a very different process than it is now. The animosities between the two communities were so strong that anybody coming from Dublin was naturally suspect. He leant over backwards to accommodate unionists and to try to bring about mutual reconciliation and peace in Northern Ireland and took a fair amount of flak for so doing. His aim at all times was to take the gun out of Irish politics, to stop the bombs and killings and to stop the communal hatred and replace it with a different type of politics.
Senator O'Reilly also mentioned John Bruton's European views and it occurs to me that he was a committed European federalist. It is undoubtedly the case that he would have been disappointed by Brexit, as we all are. His views on Europe were not mainstream Irish views because they were probably more federalist than most Irish people would be. Again, he never concealed his commitment to a federalist Europe and made it plain at every hand's turn that he aspired to it.
He eventually ended up, by irony, as the chief representative of all the businesses in the International Financial Services Centre, IFSC. That was a strange outcome because it was a body largely established at the instigation of his great rival, Charles Haughey. Again, his aim in all of that was not self-promotion but to ensure that the economic success of this country developed in the way that it has.
The most important point about John Bruton was his sense of humour. He was highly intelligent and imaginative, and was frequently way ahead of others in conversation, but his laugh and his enjoyment of company endure. I remember dinners in King's Inns when the whole dining hall was shaking with his laughter. I always thought he was the most genial and pleasant person with whom one could deal.
Those things having been said, Finola, Matthew, Emily, Juliana and Mary-Elizabeth have lost a wonderful husband and father but they should be buoyed to some extent in their grief by the huge outpouring of admiration and gratitude we have seen over the past few days.Again, to Richard, another person who has quietly devoted his entire life to public service, I extend my deepest sympathy on the loss of his brother John. For one family to produce two politicians who have quietly but consistently served the State when it was not in their economic interest to do so, is significant. It probably was not economically necessary for them to become involved in politics. It was probably to their detriment that they did but their belief in their values has driven them. I will end on this point. We are, as has been said, including by Senator Cassells here, living in a world where people hide behind anonymity to attack, to denigrate, to drag people down, to distrust their motivation and to make allegations of corruption or cynicism or whatever against everybody else but if we look back on John Bruton's contribution to Irish public life, there is a better kind of politics and it should not die with John Bruton. We should all dedicate ourselves to upholding, if not all his political beliefs, at least his personal values and his commitment to Ireland as a functioning democracy.
]]>I do not want to be negative and I am not being negative. Things can be put into the Constitution that have no effect virtually at all. For a disabled citizen who needs care but does not have a family in a position to give that care, this amendment does not even aspire to deal with their situation. The term “striving” means nothing because it is striving to support family members who are not there to support such a person. I am suspicious generally of people tinkering with the Constitution, but I am much more suspicious of someone who says they are putting something into the fundamental rights section of the Constitution. The Constitution, in Articles 40 to 44, inclusive, deals with the personal rights of citizens, family rights, education, religious rights and children's rights. We are now putting in a new part which is headed "Care". This is a new chapter or subchapter, so to speak, in the Constitution. The strange thing about it is that no rights are being conferred and for very significant numbers of those who need care, their situation is not even being remotely addressed by the constitutional amendment we are putting in place.
I wish the Minister well in everything she does, but I do not believe this particular amendment will change anything. Senator Clonan's amendment would achieve something.
]]>Senator Clonan made a point that what we are dealing with is the rights of disabled people and the rights of citizens who are disabled to receive care and support from the State.
Regarding the proposed amendment to the Constitution, it is to insert a new heading in the fundamental rights section, described as Article 42B. Even though it is being put into the fundamental rights section of the Constitution, no rights are created whatsoever by it, and that is worrying. No rights are actually created by it; it is there but it is not creating any further rights.
Nobody can gainsay the immense contribution family carers make - that is true. However, there are people who, for one reason or another, need care from the community rather than family, for example, elderly people who have no family and disabled people who have no functional family left. Those people are not even remotely addressed by the constitutional amendment. It simply does not refer to them. Rather, it refers to the contribution of family members arising from their bonds of affection or whatever.
]]>